It is IMPOSSIBLE to have too much spirit as a mistweaver. The more spirit I have the more mana I will be regenerating, allowing me to cast more heals. This principle is especially true, and important, for monks.

I take it you've never healed before... it's okay, sometimes we have to learn the hard way that spamming more heals isn't always the answer.

I'd like to see some math done before I believe that. One buff plus one nerf doesn't automatically equal zero change. Mana Tea is not our only source of mana regeneration. Even if the changes do cancel each other out, it means we'll have to spend more time drinking Mana Tea than before (glyphed or otherwise), which takes up time that we could have spent actually healing. Most importantly, pressing Mana Tea isn't exactly engaging gameplay, and I'd have more fun if I spent that time actually healing rather than spamming a button every time it lights up just to keep the blue bar blue.

Originally Posted by Helander

It is IMPOSSIBLE to have too much spirit as a mistweaver. The more spirit I have the more mana I will be regenerating, allowing me to cast more heals. This principle is especially true, and important, for monks.

And what heals exactly will you be casting while you're already spending all your GCDs doing other things? Are you going to magically grow a second pair of hands that can cast Healing Rain and Prayer of Healing while you're jabbing? Does spirit perhaps reduce your cooldown on Renewing Mist? Please don't try to tell people what's "especially true and important" or type out "IMPOSSIBLE" in capital letters when you really have no idea what you're talking about.

And what heals exactly will you be casting while you're already spending all your GCDs doing other things? Are you going to magically grow a second pair of hands that can cast Healing Rain and Prayer of Healing while you're jabbing?

Sort of off-topic here, but ya know, I wish there was a glyph that simply turned your second tier from Chi to Mana spenders. A couple tiers from now, spamming Chi Burst repeatedly (in LFR) would be kind of awesome.

Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. " [What's half of minor?]
"Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."

I'd like to see some math done before I believe that. One buff plus one nerf doesn't automatically equal zero change. Mana Tea is not our only source of mana regeneration. Even if the changes do cancel each other out, it means we'll have to spend more time drinking Mana Tea than before (glyphed or otherwise), which takes up time that we could have spent actually healing. Most importantly, pressing Mana Tea isn't exactly engaging gameplay, and I'd have more fun if I spent that time actually healing rather than spamming a button every time it lights up just to keep the blue bar blue.

Good point, let's do some math then. Please note that the following math uses a LOT of assumptions, as things like Crit chance and amount of Mana Teas already generated and used per fight is highly variable. For my purposes, I'll be supposing that we have a 20% Crit chance (which should be fairly accurate assuming a 480 ilvl and it's a really nice number, very close to what I personally have right now) and using averages of my last two Heroic Feng (25) kills for the purposes of Mana Tea consumption.

I gained an average of 1 Mana Tea charge every 18 seconds. That equates to 3,333 mp5. Assuming a 20% Crit chance, the buff would increase that to 4,000 mp5. That 666 mp5 increase in mana regeneration would counteract a 10% increase in mana spent if one spends 6,666 mana every 5 seconds. That roughly (using some very judicious rounding) equates to one Renewing Mists or Spinning Crane Kick every 12 seconds or so. For another comparison, that's also 1 Jab every 3.7 seconds. To compare to my Feng fights, I used SCK around once every 11.7 seconds on average. I'm not sure if it's actually affected by the mana increase (it wasn't listed in the spell changes), but I used Renewing Mists as much if not more than SCK, so I believe I was actually wrong before and this will still result in a slight nerf.

I gained an average of 1 Mana Tea charge every 18 seconds. That equates to 3,333 mp5. Assuming a 20% Crit chance, the buff would increase that to 4,000 mp5. That 666 mp5 increase in mana regeneration would counteract a 10% increase in mana spent if one spends 6,666 mana every 5 seconds. That roughly (using some very judicious rounding) equates to one Renewing Mists or Spinning Crane Kick every 12 seconds or so. [...]

Considering that you use Renewing Mist on cooldown and that it's not your biggest mana expense, it's going to end up a net loss.

The nerf is warranted, but I find that the shift towards more focus on Mana Tea is simply boring. Pressing a button every 10 seconds to get mana is not very engaging gameplay. I did it with Water Shield in TBC and Cataclysm, and it just ends up being something you set up a Power Aura for, and whenever that thing lights up you press it.

Considering that you use Renewing Mist on cooldown and that it's not your biggest mana expense, it's going to end up a net loss.

The nerf is warranted, but I find that the shift towards more focus on Mana Tea is simply boring. Pressing a button every 10 seconds to get mana is not very engaging gameplay. I did it with Water Shield in TBC and Cataclysm, and it just ends up being something you set up a Power Aura for, and whenever that thing lights up you press it.

I'm not convinced the glyph will be so great anymore with the crit change. Tea stacks will become irregular and you just might get them faster than you can chug.

I'm not convinced the glyph will be so great anymore with the crit change. Tea stacks will become irregular and you just might get them faster than you can chug.

Personally I don't like having the glyph. To make the glyph worth having you basically have to hit the button every 10 seconds, where not having the glyph I can let the stacks build up and use 1-20 stacks when I feel the need to replenish some mana.

You guys are crazy. We had a monk in our raid in mostly blues killing other healers simply because he was a monk. I could push 1-3 buttons and dominate most fights. While I think the nerfs are way overboard, and likely to be tuned back a bit, they were certainly needed. When 2/3rds your healing team is considering rerolling monk to be the flavor of the month.. something has to be done.. for realz.

You guys are crazy. We had a monk in our raid in mostly blues killing other healers simply because he was a monk. I could push 1-3 buttons and dominate most fights. While I think the nerfs are way overboard, and likely to be tuned back a bit, they were certainly needed. When 2/3rds your healing team is considering rerolling monk to be the flavor of the month.. something has to be done.. for realz.

This. Very much this. I would be fine with a 25% nerf to the healing done by Renewing Mist. I'm not fine with reducing the number of targets healed by Renewing Mist, because it leaves a big hole in our toolkit. A toolkit that's pretty porous to begin with.

Time for today's edition of this question: "On Live, am I the only one that has excess stacks of mana tea left by the end of a boss fight or are we implying dropping the glyph and chugging normally again?"

I do not have extra stacks by the end of a boss fight. In fact, in some cases I have used focus potion for mana regen(on feng for example).

The idea of a PTR, especially in the case of a brand new class, is to try out a bunch of things that may or may not make it to live servers. Don't take the changing patch notes as being set in stone. If the nerfs end up with monks really struggling to heal, there's nothing stopping them being cushioned a bit before it goes live.

Monks are extremely potent AND efficient right now. If this ends up bringing us more in line with other classes, then nerfs are justified.

When was the last time you wanted to cast Soothing Mist but didn't or couldn't because of the mana cost? Has this ever happened?

That's not the point. It's a matter of how much extra mana you'll have during the fight because of it. Looking at our Grand Empress kill this week, I had 327 ticks of soothing mist (there's a ticks column and a hits column. I'm only looking at ticks - this number may actually be higher if I should combine them). Now I'm not 100% sure on how the mana for it works out (3000 on cast + 3000/sec) versus the number of ticks, but sitting here unbuffed if I cast it I see 9 ticks and I believe my mana drops 8 times, so I'll say it's 24,000 mana for 9 ticks. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

So going off those numbers, 327/9*24000 = 872,000 mana I spent on soothing mists. Reducing that by a third, I'd have saved 287,760 mana during the fight. That's almost an entire mana bar to cast more spells with. Now with this latest change (-33%, +10%), I believe I read it's only a 27.4% reduction instead of 33%, but that's still 238,928 mana less.

hmm, ppl are as usual focusing on the nerfs and not on the buffs. keep in mind, you now get 50% more haste from items, which affect mana regen, which again effects chi generation, which again effect mana tea etc. you get the idea. the haste buff does offset a lot of the nerfs altho not all of them but i would agree with one of the posters here, a 25-30% nerf to the heal of renewing mist would have been preferable to the reduction of targets, it does seem a bit too much to me.

Go ask any of the 5 healing specs if they were reforging TO Spirit or reforging AWAY from Spirit in Dragon Soul. Spoilers: most of them were reforging away. The supposition that you always want more Spirit and can never have too much is simply false, there is a point where throwing out bigger heals is better than throwing out more heals.

Go ask any of the 5 healing specs if they were reforging TO Spirit or reforging AWAY from Spirit in Dragon Soul. Spoilers: most of them were reforging away. The supposition that you always want more Spirit and can never have too much is simply false, there is a point where throwing out bigger heals is better than throwing out more heals.

While this is completely true, don't forget that during Dragon Soul you could stack Intellect instead of Spirit and get mana regen. It was better to have Power Torrent than Heartsong for any healer, at the time.

The classes as they are now can be a bit more tricky. There's claims that Disc Priest would need 13k spirit before spirit would actually become devalued. (in Live, not the PTR changes. Hence, those changes.)

Now, with Monk we obviously aren't having this problem when playing "correctly." (Someone wanna point out how they learned to do that without someone else telling them? Cause leveling certainly didn't teach it.) When it comes down to it, MW healing is so weak per tick or per use that not gemming intellect and focusing on Crit (5m, 10m) would essentially make Surging Mist a dead skill. In ilvl468 gear, unbuffed, my Surging Mist is healing for ~60k. That's eight casts to heal a nearly dead 500k health tank. Meaning I'd be spending 48% of my mana on a single target. No amount of spirit can offset that as it stands.

Long story short, I agree with you for the most part.

Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. " [What's half of minor?]
"Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."

Go ask any of the 5 healing specs if they were reforging TO Spirit or reforging AWAY from Spirit in Dragon Soul. Spoilers: most of them were reforging away. The supposition that you always want more Spirit and can never have too much is simply false, there is a point where throwing out bigger heals is better than throwing out more heals.

This isn't Dragon Soul, it's Blackwing Descent. Besides, the idea that you reforge spirit away until you end up with an amount that lets you end up with 0 mana at the end of the fight is a flawed one. As soon as something goes wrong causing you to spend more mana than anticipated, you are OOM and in trouble. Balancing mana regen and throughput is a subtle art, but if your raid is killing the boss and no one is dying, then it doesn't matter if you have too much spirit.

I'm not too concerned about the nerfs. We were working on Garalon yesterday and at berserk, I was still above 25% mana. A 10% increase to mana cost wouldn't break me. Conversely, there are still times where Mana Tea comes off cooldown and I only have one stack. Healing-wise, I was doing 100-110k HPS, while the next highest (a resto shaman) was doing 70-75k. Looking at my breakdown, 60-65% came from ReM/Uplift, and the rest of the healing was from things that are not affected by the nerf. I could still expect to be leading the pack doing over 80k HPS post-nerf.

As far as our 'toolkit,' nerfing the number of targets was the right decision to bring us inline with other healers, as opposed to nerfing the healing done. Other healers signature AoE heals tend to either hit about 5-6 targets (wild growth, circle of healing, chain heal) or require stacking (swiftmend, healing rain, holy word sanctuary). With this change we go from rolling it on 8-10 targets to rolling it on 6-8.

Tank heals are definitely our weakest area, but this is also where the changes to soothing mist and haste will benefit the most. The only heal we have that really benefits from haste is Soothing Mist and the increased chi generation should make any tank healing smoother. I'm not sure it's really enough, but at least it's an improvement.

I'm not sure what people want for raid utility to be more than zero. Revival is functional as a big AoE heal and Life Cocoon as a tank cooldown. Certainly, they can be stronger, but not while our current healing is so powerful. We can spec into Xuen, which does a solid amount of healing and damage over 45 seconds (looking like over 600k per cast for me). We can also add an extra 10k or more DPS to a fight, which pulling solid healing numbers.

I'm not sure what people want for raid utility to be more than zero. Revival is functional as a big AoE heal and Life Cocoon as a tank cooldown. Certainly, they can be stronger, but not while our current healing is so powerful. We can spec into Xuen, which does a solid amount of healing and damage over 45 seconds (looking like over 600k per cast for me). We can also add an extra 10k or more DPS to a fight, which pulling solid healing numbers.

To the point, though, as far as raid utility I'd like some form of shared mana recovery (say, when drinking tea you release an aura that doesn't effect yourself that grants a few seconds of 0.5% mana recovery) If that would be too strong or complicated, then some form of buff that gets put on by our heals (divine aegis, ancestral vigor, grace, etc) that would assist other healers or reduce raid damage. (Say, Revival giving a 5 second 10% damage reduction buff or similar) If nothing else, a tank-centric buff from our Soothing Mist like the one I described here would be be greatly appreciated if another healer was to die or suddenly go OoM during a battle.

Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. " [What's half of minor?]
"Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."